Creative nudges for good land use
Better financial incentives for ranchers who might cut down rainforests fit into a global shift in values in many rural areas.
Cattle walk along an illegally deforested area in a reserve in Rondonia state, Brazil, last year.
AP
In early October, a group of public organizations and private funders backed a novel strategy to slow deforestation in the Amazon basin. It plans to provide financial incentives for cattle ranchers in Colombia to restore degraded pasturelands in the world’s largest rainforest.
The ranchers, in other words, would be on the front line in mitigating climate change, joining many of the world’s rural areas in a shift in values on land use.
“We can choose our values, and how to live with them,” Marília Moura, a spokesperson for one of many farming collectives across rural Portugal formed in response to climate change, told The Christian Science Monitor.
By some estimates, the world requires $2.4 trillion a year to address global warming. That need is driving innovations in climate finance. Each year, dozens of new funding tools emerge to help businesses and communities adapt to climate change and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
“It used to be ecology versus economics,” Portuguese farmer Pipo Vieira told the Monitor. “Now people realize it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead of ... exploiting nature, we can live differently.”
In Colombia, cattle ranching occupies 80% of agricultural land, employing more than 800,000 people. Since the signing of a peace accord in 2016 that ended a half-century of conflict between the government and a guerrilla group, a few projects have shown how restoring farming communities and surrounding ecosystems can lead to economic renewal.
The new finance model is one of 10 pilot projects endorsed by the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance. It brings together investors and cattle ranchers in potentially lasting partnerships. Instead of saddling farming families with debt, the investments are based on deferred profit-sharing after five years.
Many countries are expanding their thinking on what is possible with the climate challenge. In the Caribbean, for example, people need a “cultural confidence,” said Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, in a 2020 speech, “that plays to our strengths and which captures the imagination of our own people” in response to the region’s problems, such as vulnerability to natural disasters.